Jenny Delasalle's blog

library connect

Last week I was privileged to be a speaker at the Library Connect event in Zurich. I was talking about research impact metrics and presented the handy cards/poster that I worked on, but my brief was to run a workshop so I didn’t talk too much! I said why I think that bibliometrics are part of the librarian’s domain and summarised the FWCI: then it was on to our workshop discussions. I was really glad to hear more from the attendees about their experiences, and I think it was a real strength of the event that librarians got to talk to each other.

Workshopping!

I’ve been to the Nordic Library Connect event in the past, but what was really nice about the Swiss one, was that we had researchers as well as librarians there, and the setting was nice and informal so we had lots of conversations in the breaks, as well as in the workshop itself. Whereas most of the Scandinavian librarians were from large central university libraries, at Zurich there were more librarians from smaller departmental and embedded libraries. I get the impression that in the German speaking areas in general, the departmental libraries are more common than in the UK and Scandinavia.

Departmental librarians have slightly different concerns, reflecting the needs of the particular subject community they serve. I chatted (in my clunky German!) with two librarians from the University of Zurich Economics department library, who reminded me of the importance of working papers amongst their community. And it was interesting to hear perspectives from CERN, where they have excellent data about their publications and of course the arXiv resource. I’ve also learnt that ETH Zurich has a library service called “Lib4RI” that serves four scientific research institutes.

I was really pleased to see Dr Oliver Renn of again, who had been a speaker at the Stockholm event. His library (or “Infozentrum“) really seems to have good links with his department, and I can highly recommend a special edition of their newsletter, which presents various attitudes towards bibliometrics. The ETH Department of Chemistry and Applied Biosciences use the Altmetric donut so that their researchers can see who is giving their outputs attention, and they are working with Kudos for promotion of their science.

Charon in action!

A highlight of the day for me, was Charon Duermeijer talking about research ethics and prompting us all to think about our role in supporting researchers with such matters. I highly recommend her as a speaker because she interacts with the audience, asking us questions, and her slides have real substance. I’m sure that she’ll be sharing her slides, so you can get something of a feel for her talk, but her passion and anecdotes will be missing so catch her if you can, at another event.